"Artistic resistance has seldom proven so socially useful, or as complicated. This intellectually engaging study targets the paradoxes, limitations, and media spectacle of organized cultural boycotts and state-sponsored censorship from South African apartheid in the 1980s, to present day Israel-Palestine, Cuba, the Gulf States, the United Kingdom, and the U.S., among other geopolitical zones of conflict."
-- Gregory Sholette, artist and author of Delirium and Resistance: Activist Art and the Crisis of Capitalism

The refusal to participate in an oppressive system has long been one of the most powerful tools in the organizer's arsenal. Assuming Boycott: Resistance, Agency, and Cultural Production is the essential reader for today's creative leaders and cultural practitioners, and includes original contributions by artists, scholars, activists, critics, curators and writers who examine the historical precedent of South Africa; the current cultural boycott of Israel; freedom of speech and self-censorship; and long-distance activism. Far from representing withdrawal or cynicism, boycott emerges as a special condition for discourse, artmaking and political engagement.

As U.S. cultural and academic organizations are increasingly subjects of boycotts -- in response to the ban on immigration from majority Muslim countries issued by the current U.S. administration -- the question of boycott attains additional urgency. This May Day Book Launch features the three editors, Kareem Estefan, Carin Kuoni and Laura Raicovich, in a lively exchange with book contributors artist Mariam Ghani and art historian Chelsea Haines, joined by Claire Potter, Professor of History, The New School, and investigates the potential of boycott as a tool for organizing and art making.

A festive reception with DJs ConVex and DJD (Salome Asega and Derek Schultz) follows, in celebration of the book and other May Day assemblies in the city. Co-sponsored by Interference Archive, on occasion of the archive's April 23 Sowing Resistance, Propaganda Party No. 5.